Solid state drives (“SSD”) are becoming economical for use as bootable mass storage devices. SSDs are commonly fabricated to include flash memory devices, such as nonvolatile flash memory devices including Not AND (“NAND”) type devices. Accordingly, an SSD write operation has different considerations than does a typical hard disk drive (“HDD”) that can over-write invalid (deleted) data with valid (new) data at the same physical location on the disk. SSD write operations typically include a page-oriented merge operation so as to merge the new data with existing data of the same memory block into a new memory block. Should the existing data be invalid, such a merge operation may unnecessarily impact SSD performance. Additionally, for reliability reasons, SSDs typically perform “wear leveling” operations to reduce memory cell life-span degradation. Such operations typically move data from one block or page to another block or page. Should the data on one page be invalid, a wear leveling operation for that page may unnecessarily impact SSD performance and potentially decrease SSD reliability. Further, typical file systems generally maintain state information indicating which data are considered deleted (invalid) and which are not. But this data is not typically migrated to a corresponding storage device, such as an HDD or SSD, in a manner that corresponds to all the data and where the data is physically stored on the device, as one or more logical block addresses for example. Accordingly storage devices, as opposed to file systems, are generally unaware of what data is valid and what data is invalid, and are therefore typically unable to recognize invalid data so as to avoid unnecessary operations on such data.